veraPDF 1.0 ships, acceptance testing begins

The veraPDF consortium has announced the release of veraPDF 1.0, an open-source industry-supported PDF/A validator.

Led by the Open Preservation Foundation and the PDF Association, veraPDF validates all parts and conformance levels of ISO 19005 (PDF/A). The software is available under a MPLv2+/GLPv3+ license.

The 1.0 release is required by PREFORMA in order to initiate Phase 3 testing and acceptance, which runs from February 1 - July 30, 2017. Users are strongly encouraged to report bugs or other concerns to the project’s GitHub issue tracker: https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/issues.

We hope to see users and industry performing large-scale testing of the software to help us find remaining bugs and make necessary and/or desirable enhancements within the PREFORMA-contracted period.

Commenting on the release of version 1.0, Carl Wilson, Technical Lead for the Open Preservation Foundation said: “Identifying a file’s format and establishing that it conforms to the format specification is an essential step for memory institutions with responsibilities for long term preservation and access. veraPDF helps users to evaluate their files against the standard. A PDF feature reporter and a customisable policy checker allows organisations to enforce institutional policy beyond the scope of PDF/A.”

Duff Johnson, Executive Director for the PDF Association said: “The release of veraPDF 1.0 is a significant milestone for both the PDF industry and the digital preservation community. For the PDF industry, the project to develop veraPDF facilitated the identification and resolution of ambiguities in the PDF/A specification, improving interoperability and utility to end users. For the digital preservation community, veraPDF delivers authoritative information about the nature and long-term reliability of digital holdings while providing more tools to help preservationists advise contributors on their software and workflows.”

The PDF Association is preparing a Technical Note highlighting the ambiguities uncovered during development of veraPDF, and their corresponding resolutions. The organisation plans to publish TechNote 0010 in Q1 of 2017.

veraPDF now enters its contracted acceptance testing phase, which runs until July 2017.

Version 1.0 has the following enhancements and fixes as compared to the final beta release:

Application enhancements

• fixed default values for extracted PDF features; and
  fixed removal of temporary files.

Once again, we ask users to review the veraPDF documentation site for installation and user guides and provide feedback.

Conformance checker

• fixed cmap table parsing in TrueType fonts.

Test corpus

• changed metadata file provenance test files from FAIL to PASS (as resolved by the PDF Association’s PDF Validation Technical Working Group); and
  fixed xref table in test case 6-3-3-t01-pass-a.

Download veraPDF 1.0

PDFBox version: https://software.verapdf.org/

"Greenfield" PDF parser version:

Release notes

https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/releases/latest

Call for testing

Please support our efforts by downloading and testing the software!

If you encounter problems or would like to suggest improvements, please add them to the veraPDF consortium's GitHub issue tracker.

Your feedback is very important as it helps us to improve this free, open-source software.

Keep up to date with the latest developments by subscribing to the veraPDF consortium’s newsletter: http://verapdf.org/subscribe/.

About

The veraPDF consortium is funded by the PREFORMA project. PREFORMA (PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives) is a Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) project co-funded by the European Commission under its FP7-ICT Programme.

Find out more

Webinar: Watch the recording and slides from veraPDF's latest webinar.

PDF Days Europe 2017: We'll be there to talk about veraPDF!